In the post below on the prolific nature of the Kennedy clan some commenters were curious as to the general socioeconomic slant of Irish Catholics. The GSS has a variable ETHNIC which asks which nation an individual’s ancestors came from. Combine that with RELIG, and you can figure out how Irish Catholics stack up nationally. While I was looking at Irish Catholics I thought I would look at whites from various nations. I decided to exclude Jews from the analysis because I think there’s a big difference between Polish Catholics and Polish Jews socioeconomically and we’d lose information aggregating. Further, I constrained the sample to non-Hispanic whites. To look at socioeconomic index I focused on the SEI variable. Here’s how SEI is calculated:
SEI scores were originally calculated by Otis Dudley Duncan based on NORC’s 1947 North-Hatt prestige study and the 1950 U.S. Census. Duncan regressed prestige scores for 45 occupational titles on education and income to produce weights that would predict prestige. This algorithm was then used to calculate SEI scores for all occupational categories employed in the 1950 Census classification of occupations. Similar procedures have been used to produce SEI scores based on later NORC prestige studies and censuses.
Here are some values for reference:
Jewish = 62
White non-Hispanic = 51
Hispanic = 43
Black = 42
Only High School Education = 43
Bachelor’s Degree = 63
I’ve crossed the ethnic groups with religion & region (RELIG & REGION):
| Protestant | Catholic | No Religion | Northeast | Midwest | South | West | |
| German | 50 | 52 | 50 | 50 | 49 | 52 | 51 |
| French | 50 | 47 | - | 47 | 48 | 51 | - |
| Slavic | 50 | 50 | 62 | 50 | 51 | 55 | 55 |
| Nordic | 55 | 52 | 52 | 55 | 49 | 58 | 58 |
| Irish | 50 | 55 | 49 | 52 | 49 | 51 | 52 |
| Italian | 53 | 53 | 53 | 53 | 51 | 54 | 54 |
| British | 54 | 55 | 55 | 54 | 51 | 54 | 57 |
| Dutch | 46 | - | - | - | 45 | - | - |
I omitted cells where the N < 50. Additionally, “British” aggregates those of Scottish, Welsh, English, and “American” ancestry. Nordic combines those from all the Nordic countries. French includes Quebecois. I’ll let readers speculate, but I’m pretty sure that those with ancestors from Slavic countries of “No Religion” are disproportionately Jews.
Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002, previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.
August 15th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Sometimes when you present GSS data patterns become immediately obvious but I can’t see almost anything in this data set. The relevant take home point compared to the previous seems to be the Irish Catholics are not very far off from the general population.
August 15th, 2010 at 7:50 pm
i think this is so. the low SES of dutch and midwestern nordics though attests to the lower ratings given to rural folk who don’t move and gain higher education. the dutch are concentrated in southwest michigan.
August 15th, 2010 at 8:28 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ron Simon, Science News. Science News said: The socioeconomic status of white ethnics | Gene Expression http://dlvr.it/3rGk7 [...]
August 15th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
It would be interesting to look at the distribution of prestige whithin each group, not just their means.
August 15th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
you can. i gave you all the variables:
http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss08
August 16th, 2010 at 12:16 am
A question: Ethnic group is the country of origin or the … ethnic group ? Because Jews from Slavic countries are not Slavs so they could not be the Slavs without religion of your data.
August 16th, 2010 at 12:24 am
this is country of origin. i’m not going to get into a discussion about whether jews are X, which is why i tried to remove them from the equation (most people whose ancestors are from russia in the united states are jewish, not great russian, so that has to be addressed in data analysis).
August 16th, 2010 at 2:16 am
People with an Irish Catholic grandparent tend to define themselves as Irish in a way than people with one English or German grandparent do not define themselves as English or German. These people of predominantly non Irish ancestry have a socioeconomic status in line with their actual rather than their claimed ancestry, hence the real Irish are made to look more successful that they are.
I’m sure the same thing is true of many claiming to be Native American.
August 16th, 2010 at 5:16 am
I didn’t expect Southern whites to have higher SES than whites from the Northeast.
August 16th, 2010 at 11:40 am
I’m surprised to see people of German heritage ranked as low as they are.
August 16th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
What do these numbers mean? By what measure can the Nordic countries can be equally protestant and catholic?
August 16th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
a minority of americans whose ancestry are from nordic countries are roman catholic. that’s what you’re seeing. the rows and columns do not add up on the margins.
August 17th, 2010 at 9:56 am
[...] The socioeconomic status of white ethnics | Gene Expression … [...]
August 19th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Germans (and French) have low verbal IQs and thus fare poorly in this loudmouth, anti-intellectual entertainment economy. And ditto the German-Americans (Bobby Flay, Donald Trump, Bob Newhart, etc.) hiding behind their Celtic genetics meme–all Germans have had a distinctly beta cast since, oooh, around the mid-forties. Considering how much more accomplished the Germans are as a people, this is the usual sad commentary on the declining American society.
August 22nd, 2010 at 8:16 pm
[...] Khan – “The Historical Uses of Relativism“, ”The Socioeconomic Status of White Ethnics“, “Empires of the Word & Anti-Babel“, [...]